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“The Role of Government is to Write the Rules,” Elizabeth Warren for US Senate

We need Shepard Fairey to begin designing a new campaign poster: “More Change We Can Believe In.”

Elizabeth Warren is exploring a run for the US Senate, and hopefully for President of the United States in 2016 (and 2020). She has a no-nonsense, transparency of financial rights and responsibilities philosophy that will be good for the United States economy. Warren is candid, eloquent and able to parse financial jargon under the media spotlight in ways that clarify rather than skew public understanding of consumer financial information.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a multi-billion dollar financial bail-out program signed into law by George W. Bush on October 3, 2008. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told the American public that TARP would significantly increase small business lending- thereby targeting the engine of our economy; translating into job creation in the short run. Six months later, instead of millions of jobs there were millions of dollars in executive bonuses awarded to Wall Street bankers on the same day that the American public was treated to wall to wall coverage of Tiger Woods’s “fall from grace.”

Riding on a mantra of Too Big to Fail, the money is gone, small banks continue to pay more to borrow than the large banks, and we will never get a full accounting of total expenditures. Toxic assets are still on the books, the stress tests disappeared, and we have increased concentration as large institutions bought out smaller banks. Banks continue to hold large cash reserves, pursue short-term investments, acquire foreign assets, and move more of their operations overseas. Rescuing Wall Street banks from the consequences of their own actions was the single most unpopular initiative in recent history. Senior managers of the top banks received a hugely disproportionate share of TARP funds, retained their jobs, multi-million dollar salaries and pulled down record bonuses during the very same week that multiple federal audits accused the nation’s five largest mortgage companies of defrauding taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-backed loans. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “love child” dominated the news cycle that week. Bank of American received $45 billion in TARP funds, has more toxic assets than any other bank, has fired tens of thousands of workers and is heading toward collapse (B of A paid back $20 billion, but the other $25 billion worth of this albatross is owned by the USA). Thus, we now know that under the GW Bush legacy, Wall Street bankers retained the profits from their artificially inflated boom years then shifted their losses to taxpayers during a bust, reaping enormous profit from their worst financial practices.

The current political climate is focused upon the number of jobs that the bail-out failed to create while the Republican leadership staunchly opposed Warren’s executive leadership of the ConsumerFinancial Protection Bureau that she created. As the Obama administration prepares to unveil a new jobs-first proposal that should include pay-roll tax cuts, an infrastructure bank, and tax breaks for businesses hiring new employees, Majority Leader Eric Cantor has vowed that there will be no new stimulus spending.

If you envision Obama 2012 and Warren 2016-24, click on the links below. We may yet bring the nation’s credit rating into an authentic AAA zone. That’s a future worth working for!